Photo: Derek Watson
In honor of World Water Day, we talked to Derek Watson, the director of "This Is Normal," an informative short film about waterborne diseases that fell up to 2 million children a year. Watson clued Yahoo! Movies in on an appalling fact: One in five children in the developing world dies from contaminated water, and it's completely preventable.
What inspired Watson to make this particular film? "As a storyteller, as a human being, we want to make a difference and to eradicate the world water crisis and literally change history," he replied. "We have the opportunity to do it in our lifetime. We just need to act."
While global activism can be daunting, and a single domestic action can feel like a drop in the bucket, that's not the case here. One of the film's three subjects is Oklahoma-based businessman and Water 4 Foundation founder Dick Greenly. The owner of Pumps of Oklahoma has developed a low-tech water drilling system that allows locals in Haiti, Sierra Leone, Zambia, Uganda, and Rwanda to tap into their own underground fresh water supplies. "There is hope," Watson said, "And Water 4 is on the front end of solving this problem for good."
One in five children in the developing world dies from contaminated water and, according to Watson, it's completely preventable. Here are five things that you can do to help:
1. Watch this movie. If you can't make it to the Sarasota International Film Festival in April for the premiere, click on thisisnormalthefilm.com to watch the trailer and get more information.
2. Get in contact with an organization like Water 4 Foundation, where it's easy to donate in increments as small as $6 per child to get involved.
3. Conserve your water and be water-conscious at home. It's a global issue. And what we do here in America is going to affect our water supply, since water is not an infinite resource.
4. Contact your members of Congress and senators and encourage them to make an impact by funding and pursuing an agenda to solve the global water crisis.
5. Go out and make a film about how you use water to continue to tell the story and get it out there.
And as a sixth option, you can share this article and spread the word. Think locally, act globally - some enormous problems actually do have relatively simple solutions.